82 SOCIAL SCIENTIST introduced into the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay the native nobility...were reduced with the common people, to the holding of minute fields, cultivated by themselves, in favour of the collector of the East India Company. But a curious sort of English landlord was the zamindar, receiving only one-tenth of the rent, while he had to make over nine-tenths of it to the Government. A curious sort of French peasant was the ryot, without any permanent title in the soil, and with the taxation changing every year in proportion to the harvest."56 The one gave way to an army of speculators and middlemen oppressing the peasantry, the other to forced cultivation. In essence "the zamindari and ryotwari were both of them agrarian revolutions, effected by British ukases, and opposed to each other; the one aristocratic, the other democratic; the one a caricature of English landlordism, the other of French peasant proprietorship; but pernicious, both combining the most contradictory character— both made not for the people, who cultivate the soil, nor for the holder, who owns it, but for the Government that taxes it.9957 Here, indeed, lies the key to the understanding of the Indian question, the basis of the revolt that was to shake the foundations of India in 1857, and the key to its future: an agrarian revolution. This is the scientific perspective for understanding Indian society that was developed by Marx and Engels, but one which, with few notable exceptions like D D Kosambi, K M Ashraf, Irfan Habib, R S Sharma and Dabiprasad Chattopadhyaya, has not yet come into its own. However, as the development of the all-round crisis in our society proceeds, so will the need to comprehend, analyse and overcome it. And only Marxism provides a blue print for understanding, analysing and changing society. Therefore, the application of the Marxist approach to the study of Indian society is inevitable. The question is only when its relevance will be generally recognised. 56 Marx, "India", in On Colonialism, op cit, p 78. (July 19, 1853). 57 Ibid. Emphasis added.